


An Enchantment Not in the Hexbooks

by Alexander_L



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Action & Romance, F/M, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Henry Week 2020, It's Henry; even romantic fluff has blood and guts in it, POV Henry, Risen Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:15:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27457840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexander_L/pseuds/Alexander_L
Summary: Henry has studied every kind of magic there is, but he is still mystified by whatever spell it is that Olivia uses on him. He's always been a loner. Why is it that being alone with her isn't so bad?Written for Henry Week 2020Rated M for violence.
Relationships: Henry/Olivia (Fire Emblem)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	An Enchantment Not in the Hexbooks

People were great, sure. Even the live ones. But people were tiresome and Henry was  _ exhausted. _

As the others settled down to sleep, he snuck out of the camp and into the welcoming darkness of the woods. Amid the rustle of wind in the thickets and the moonbeams filtering through the canopy of trees he felt like he could finally breathe free again.

The smile eased from his lips and the tension from his body. With a sigh of relief, he wandered along the narrow deer trails deeper until he stepped through the tree line into a small glade. Tugging off his boots, he walked through the lush grass, reveling in the refreshing feeling of it, cool and dew-glistened under his bare feet. 

In the center of the glade, he spread his cape across the ground and sat down, tucking his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. Leaning his head back, he stared up at the stars, picking out constellations he knew and making better ones up.

He caught a glimpse of movement in the corner of his eye and it caused his mind to stop spinning around in the cosmos and return to the present. Turning his head slowly, he held his breath and watched as a gray wolf strayed into the clearing, eyeing him nervously.

Henry looked away so as not to seem aggressive by making eye contact. “Hey there, friend,” he whispered.

The wolf walked closer, ears up and tail swishing slightly in a wary but friendly gesture. Henry removed a strip of dried fish from the bag in his pocket and held it out. “Come have a bite to eat with me?”

The wolf approached and sniffed the fish then took it gently from Henry’s hand. Henry pulled out the couple other strips he had, eating one and handing the wolf the other. “Never know when you’re gonna run into wolf packs so you always gotta pack wolf snacks, that’s what I always say.”

The wolf looked up at him with bright eyes and Henry reached out to stroke its sleek silver and white fur. 

“You are a handsome pup, aren’t you? You take excellent care of your coat. I like a wolf who keeps his paws clean and his fur shining. You are a good example to all those other scarmilly marmots out there, myself included. I probably look like hell right now. I haven’t even seen a mirror in days.”

The wolf munched on the dried fish.

“Hey! You don’t have to go and agree with my own self-deprecation, you rude beast.”

The wolf cocked its head to the side and studied him with calm, knowing eyes. 

“Nyehehe, well, that’s true!” Henry laughed. “At least I can take comfort in the fact that I don’t have to look at my own face. That is a curse everyone else has to bear but I am mercifully spared from.”

The wolf nuzzled Henry’s hand with its head and panted happily. Henry smiled at it and laughed again. He tipped his head up to the sky and let loose his best approximation of a howl. The wolf looked at him in amusement then howled with him, a long, clear, graceful note that seemed to harmonize with the quiet noises of the forest rather than cut through them.

Suddenly the wolf tensed and whipped its head around to stare at something behind Henry. Glancing over his shoulder, Henry saw a small figure lingering on the edge of the clearing, frozen still. Moonlight glinted off pale pink hair and Henry’s heart skipped a beat.

“Oh she’s alright,” he told the wolf. “Wouldn’t harm a fly. She’ll gut a man on the battlefield and dance in his blood, but she won’t harm a fly, and definitely not a good creature like you.”

The wolf relaxed its posture a bit and watched with curiosity instead of alarm as Olivia took a single, tentative step into the glade.

“He won’t bite,” Henry called out to her. “Not if you don’t bite first.”

“I… I won’t bite. I promise,” Olivia said, treading light as a cat across the grass towards them. Henry had expected her to flee at the sight of him, let alone the wolf, but she seemed propelled forward by curiosity. When she finally reached them, she sat down slowly next to Henry and looked with wide, wondering eyes at the wolf.

It stared back, examining her in return. 

“Did you bring snacks?” Henry asked her.

Wordlessly, Olivia reached into her pocket and held out a biscuit. The wolf sniffed it then took it gingerly from her hand, its ruthless teeth never once grazing her skin. With a puzzled look, it crunched on the crispy biscuit for a minute then swallowed it, licking its lips.

“I know, it’s no trout, but Robin made those herself and I won’t have you turning your snout up at my friend’s baking,” Henry told the wolf.

“Can you really talk to him?” Olivia asked, her voice so hushed Henry could hardly hear it.

“Of course I can,” he said.

The wolf looked at him skeptically and Henry shot it a quick withering look.

“Will you tell him that his fur is very pretty?” Olivia asked.

Henry stared at the wolf and made a soft yipping sound followed by a quick howl. The wolf stared at him like he was crazy.

“He says thank you,” Henry told her. “He thinks your fur is pretty too, well your hair. Wolves don’t really know the difference.”

“Is this how you befriend all those crows? You can talk to them?” she asked.

“Of course. Crows are very intelligent. Much more interesting to talk to than people, once you get past all the cursing.”

Olivia looked at him in confusion.

“They’re very  _ fowl _ -mouthed,” Henry explained.

A delighted smile broke across her lips and Henry had never felt so proud of himself in his whole life.

“Can you teach me to talk to them?” she asked.

Henry shrugged. “Maybe, but I can’t guarantee they’ll talk to you. Animals are very shy.”

“You’re shy too but you still talk to me,” she said.

The wolf was panting happily again and Olivia scooted closer to reach out and pet it. Immediately, Henry stiffened, fighting the urge to move away. 

Too close. Too close. He could smell the hint of lilac perfume on her skin and hear the almost inaudible breathy laugh that escaped her lips as she smiled brightly and ruffled the wolf’s ears.

Too close!

Henry edged away a bit, heart pounding with anxiety so loud he was sure the wolf could hear it and not entirely convinced Olivia couldn’t. She was good at reading people, after all. Uncanny really. Could be a part of her magic. Henry had wanted to study her magic from the moment he met her but that would involve being in her proximity for more than five minutes and even now that she had become comfortable enough around him to trust him a bit, he certainly hadn’t become comfortable around her.

Nothing personal of course. If there was any human he wanted to be around it would have been her, with her graceful mannerisms, her sad eyes that still sparked up with joy at a joke, her tendency to space off and hum whenever she thought no one was paying attention. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, with her bewitching voice and exquisite swordsmanship on the battlefield. The way she could slice a man’s throat in the blink of an eye or lop the head off a Risen with one swift, expertly-executed strike… It was extraordinary. 

Thanks to her he’d gotten a lot of nicely severed Risen heads to experiment on. It was so much easier to extract the brain when the head wasn’t hacked to heck by Falchion or burnt to crispy toast by one of Robin’s fire spells.

He came back to reality and realized he’d been staring, paralyzed as a possum, into the shadows of the forest for a solid minute. Henry risked a glance over at Olivia and to his relief she was too busy petting the wolf to notice his minor mental crisis.

Then she began to sing, softly at first then with growing confidence. The wolf cocked its head to the side and listened to her, spell-bound, then after a moment he howled in harmony with her. 

Henry felt a strange tight feeling in his chest squeezing the breath from his lungs but this time it wasn’t anxiety. His smile faded and he stared at her in calm rapture. 

What dark magic was this? A hex of some kind? Was he being poisoned? Was he going to have a heart attack? She didn’t seem to be doing it on purpose, but if she could weaponize this it could be very-

Olivia looked over at him and when her eyes met his, her gaze softened and Henry could have sworn it was with fondness.

But then again, he could be crazy. Everyone said he was crazy, after all. Crazy old Henry, off his rocker a mile wide, addle-brained as a spell-struck sheep, belfry chock-full of barmy bats. It was not out of the question – it was never out of the question – that he could be a complete fool and entirely imagining that look in her eyes.

Yes, that was the only logical explanation: insanity.

“Henry?” she said.

“Yep, that’s me,” he replied.

“There’s… something I want to tell-”

A growl rumbled in the wolf’s throat and Olivia jumped, looking over at it in alarm. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

The fog of whatever suspicious and potent enchantment Olivia was casting on him cleared and Henry leapt to his feet, his hand straying to the pocket of his coat to grab hold of his magic tome.

“Risen,” he said.

“Here?” Olivia said, jumping up and drawing her sword.

“Not a horde,” Henry said, listening carefully to the rustle of brush and snap of twigs that had alerted the wolf to the approaching threat. “Just an outlier.”

The wolf’s hackles raised and Henry told it, “Go warn your pack and scout around for any others. We’ll take care of this one.”

The creature didn’t need to understand him to do what he said. Wolves were not lone fighters, after all. As the wolf dashed off, vanishing into the forest, Henry withdrew his tome and drew from its energy with one hand, holding out his other as violet flames of dark magic burst to life and danced across his palm hungrily.

Olivia moved into a fighting stance, her expression hardening to one of deadly concentration.

“I’d like some intestines to dissect this time so if you wouldn’t mind avoiding slicing through its middle, that’d be swell,” Henry told her. 

“Why the intestines?”

“Well, we keep killing them but they keep coming back to fight us regardless. I want to find out what gives them the guts to keep fighting!”

Olivia grimaced a little but nodded. “Alright, I’ll go for the throat.”

“Great! Thanks!” he said with a grin. 

A moment later the monster burst through the treeline and into the glade, a jagged shriek ripping from its throat when it caught sight of them.

With a sound somewhere between frightened squeak and a fearsome scream, Olivia charged it, blade shining in the moonlight as she attacked. Keeping a few paces behind her, Henry ran forward and launched a spell at the creature. It flew past Olivia, precisely missing her, albeit by a narrow margin, and hit the Risen squarely in the legs, staggering it.

In a flash, Olivia reached it, leaping up and slashing its throat in one cut. She landed back on the grass and rolled out of the way as the beast crashed down to the ground in a gruesome gurgle of blood, the foul magic powering it smoking out from its body to dissipate in the air.

With a gag, Olivia kicked it onto its back and poked at its stomach with the tip of her blade. “We didn’t damage its guts,” she said, looking back at Henry with a smile at her own helpfulness.

“Gee, we make a good team!” Henry replied. “That was easy peasy-”

From the trees burst half a dozen Risen in a growling, groaning chaos of claws.

“-lemon squeezy,” Henry finished. He sighed. “Never a moment’s peace.” He turned to Olivia. “Should we make a run for it?”

“And leave them here to find that wolf’s pack and hurt them? No!” she cried. 

“Good point,” Henry said. “Guess we’ll make a stand. There are worse ways to die.”

There were many better ways to die, of course. In fact, most ways were better. But Henry figured there was no point in discouraging Olivia when she was being so brave.

Igniting his magic to its full power, he blasted back the nearest Risen with a spell, clearing space for Olivia to attack one of them. Taking them on one-by-one wasn’t worth batting an eyelash at, but trying to hold a group of them at bay on his own was nothing to be sneezed at. Henry was pretty confident in his god-given talent for murder, but even he wasn’t sure he could take on six Risen at a time if he and Olivia got surrounded. He had to make sure he controlled the flow of the fight with his spells so they wouldn’t get ganged up on all at once.

Clutching his tome and firing spells as desperately and swiftly as he could, he beat back two of the Risen while Olivia dodged the attacks of a couple others, managing to kill one. Adrenaline coursed through Henry, lending ferocity to his magic, and he engulfed one of the beasts in a writhing, hissing cloud of dark magic that seared the rotten flesh from its bones.

One more fell, then another. Hope sprang into his heart.

“Henry!” 

He barely registered Olivia’s warning scream before he felt claws rake across his back. Pain shot through him and he tried to turn to incinerate the monster in a spell but the vicious serrated claws sunk into his arm, ripping into his skin and wrenching his bone. Henry felt a snap and his magic tome fell from his hand as his broken arm went limp.

Well, this was less than ideal.

Olivia darted away from the Risen she was fighting and threw herself at the one slashing Henry, burying her blade so deep into it that it jutted through its chest as the beast screeched and fell. The second it took Olivia to wrench her blade free was the opening the other monster needed to attack.

As Henry staggered back a step, clutching his broken arm and struggling to think clearly through the pain, the beast seized Olivia in its massive, reeking hands, wrenching the sword from her grip. It clamped its fingers around her throat, lifting her off the ground as she choked and struggled, and it raised its other hand to strike.

But before it could bring its lethal claws bearing down across Olivia’s body, a feral sort of scream ripped from Henry’s throat and he lunged forward, compelled by instinct and most certainly not by reason.

Snatching up Olivia’s sword with his one good hand, he hacked at the Risen, severing the arm holding Olivia. It wailed in pain and she tumbled to the ground. But it turned out that a solid maiming didn’t stop the creature. It only enraged it.

It turned on Henry and he attempted to slash at it again, but he was a mage gods damn it not a swordsman! He was disarmed – quite literally – and, frankly, scared out of his wits.

Henry laughed. There were definitely better ways to die. Oh well. One day you’re skipping around having a lark and the next a Risen is carving you up like a holiday ham and munching on your kidneys – that was just how life went in this crazy world!

“NO!” Olivia yelled and pushed herself up from the ground. With the grace of a ballerina and the reckless ferocity of a grizzly bear, she leapt up and grabbed hold of the Risen from behind, cinching her arm around its neck in a chokehold and clinging on for dear life.

Henry dropped the sword and ducked down to grab his magic tome. Its power surged through his broken arm and he gritted his teeth against the pain as the spell tore from his palm and hit the Risen square in the chest, burning a hole straight through its lungs and ripping into its heart.

With a hideous growl, the beast fell, taking Olivia down with it and Henry dropped to his knees, cradling his twisted arm and gasping for breath.

“Well, all’s well that ends well,” he said numbly, smiling as Olivia shoved the body of the Risen off herself and stood up, trembling and covered in blood. 

“Henry!” she said, staggering over to him and kneeling down next to him, examining his arm worriedly. “You almost died!”

“Nah, I’m fine. Most of my blood is still inside me where it belongs and I’m sure Lissa can patch this little scrape up fine,” he said.

Tears welled up in Olivia’s eyes and she opened her mouth to speak, but was too shaken up to find any words.

Henry had no idea what to say either. He knew he always said the wrong thing so sometimes he figured he should just shut the heck up. But he had to do something. She looked so heartbroken at his pain.

Plucking a wildflower from the grass, he reached out and tucked it in her hair. It was a rare kind of flower only found in the forests of Ylisse, and although there were a few splatters of blood across its snow-white petals, it still was rather fetching in her pink hair.

Olivia smiled. Henry smiled back – not the smile he wore like armor but rather one that just came naturally to his lips as he looked at her.

“Before… I was going to tell you something,” she said.

“Oh yeah.” Henry swallowed nervously. “There’s something I should tell you too. You deserve the truth.”

Olivia gazed into his eyes nervously. “Henry, I want to tell you that I-”

Unfortunately Henry picked the same instant as her to make his confession. “I can’t actually talk to animals.”

Olivia stopped mid-sentence and stared at him in shock for a second then burst out laughing. “I know you can’t, you idiot!” She wiped the tears from her eyes and sniffed. “But it was fun to go along with it and see what you would say! You always make me laugh, even when… even when everything is horrible and terrifying, you make me laugh and smile!”

Henry sighed in relief. “It feels good to get that off my chest. Now what were you going to say? I’m sorry I interrupted you. I didn’t mean to.”

“I was going to say that-” Olivia hesitated then leaned forward and threw her arms around Henry’s neck, hugging him gently. He froze in shock, heart pounding as she kissed his cheek and whispered in his ear, “I care about you, you weird, wonderful man. I care about you more than I know how to say.”

Henry’s shock gave way to a rush of joy he didn’t even know he was capable of feeling. He raised his good hand to stroke tentatively through her hair, marveling at how it was just as silky as he imagined it would be. 

Olivia pulled back to look up at him worriedly, searching his eyes to see if he felt the same way. Slipping his hand behind her head, he tugged her closer and pressed his lips against hers. It was a terrifying thing to let her get this close to him, more frightening and exhilarating than staring into the jaws of death had been minutes ago. But Olivia was the bravest person he’d ever met and she deserved for him to be brave in return.

Her lips parted with a soft breathless laugh of joy and Henry kissed her more intently, euphoria making him dizzy and courageous and filled with a longing to hold her and kiss her and never let her go.

“You need to have Lissa fix your arm!” Olivia gasped, breaking away to look down in concern at his arm. She stood up and helped him to his feet. “Let’s get back to camp!”

Henry followed her unwillingly, wanting nothing more than to stay in that magical glade and keep kissing her amidst the lovely wildflowers and stinking Risen corpses. But Olivia was stubborn and he knew there was no talking her out of something when she decided on it. She was going to haul him back to camp and get him healed and he might as well not argue.

Chaos beset the camp when they arrived in their bloodied and harrowed state. But the chatter and noise and fretting glided off Henry like water off a duck’s back. He just smiled and stayed quiet, letting Olivia answer Chrom and Robin’s urgent questions and letting Lissa heal up his injuries.

He finally spoke up when Robin came over and knelt down next to him with a fond, worried smile. “There weren’t supposed to be any enemies on this road. I can’t believe you got so unlucky as to run into trouble like that.”

Henry looked over her shoulder at Olivia who was washing the blood from her hands, the wildflower still tucked into her braid.

“Nah,” Henry said with a grin. “Today’s the luckiest damn day of my life.”


End file.
